Full record for sense of wonder n.

a feeling of awakening or awe brought on by an expansion of one's awareness of what may be possible; the primary emotional experience of reading science fiction

OED requirements

antedating 1881

Earliest cite

'History of Sangamon County, Illinois'

Comment

We would still like citations for this phrase in a science fiction context earlier than 1936.

Leah Zeldes submitted a 1959 cite from Fancyclopedia II. James A. Landau submitted a cite from Damon Knight's article "The Classics" in a 1968 reprint of "In Search of Wonder"; Alistair Durie verified the 1956 original printing in Future Science Fiction. Enoch Forrester submitted a cite from a 1978 reprint of Brian Ash's 1977 "A Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction". Jeff Prucher submitted a cite from a 1995 reprint of David N. Samuelson's 1973 "Childhood's End: A Median Stage of Adolescence". Jeff Prucher submitted a 1981 cite from Vonda McIntyre's "The Straining Your Eyes Through the Viewscreen Blues".
Jeff Prucher submitted a cite from a 1967 edition of Damon Knight's "In Search of Wonder" (in a review of Chad Oliver's "Another Kind"); Mike Christie verified the original appearance in the March 1956 "Original Science Fiction Stories". Jeff Prucher submitted a 1984 cite from David Hartwell's "Age of Wonders". Fred Galvin submitted a 1963 cite from Sam Moskowitz in "The Proceedings; CHICON III". Fred Galvin located and Alistair Durie submitted a 1951 cite from Milton Lesser's "The Sense of Wonder". Fred Galvin submitted a 1946 cite from Henry Kuttner's "Absalom".
Fred Galvin submitted cite from a reprint of Clemence Dane's "American Fairy Tails" which Jeff Prucher verified in the original 1936 publication in The Fortnightly.

Fred Galvin submitted a 1956 cite from Roger De Soto in Amazing Stories which suggests that Sam Moskowitz originated the phrase in his columns in "fan-and-prozines"; we would like to see cites from his earlier columns.

Bill Mullins submitted a 1912 cite from Seymour Currey's "Chicago, its history and its builders". Bill Mullins submitted an 1881 cite from the "History of Sangamon County, Illinois".

Last modified

6 July, 2008

Citations for sense of wonder n.

The scene of the mountains and of the prairie are widely different. The one grand and full of life, but impressing the first beholder with a sense of beauty; the other silent, grand, sublime, and impressing its first beholder with a sense of wonder and awe, but alike suggestive of the thought that none but God, One, Almighty, Allwise, could make them, and with wonder that anyone could doubt it, or believe that they came into existence by chance, by evolution or the aggregation of sentient particles of matter.

1936‘C. Dane’Amer. Fairy-Tale in N. Amer. Rev. Autumn 147

For three years in short these papers have been an enormous amusement to me, for crude, illiterate, slangy as most of the stories are, they do none the less represent a stirring of the ancient sense of wonder, the human love of magic, in a continent poor in legends and peopled by aliens from all over the world. These amazing magazines call themselves ‘science fiction.’ But they are nothing in the world but America's fairy-tales.

1936‘C. Dane’American Fairy Tales in Fortnightly Apr. 466

Its fairy-tales will be the literary expression of its particular sense of wonder, its individual conception of delight.

1946H. KuttnerAbsalom in Startling Stories Fall 96/1

You couldn't understand it yourself. You tried it, and it was beyond you. You're not flexible. Your logic isn't flexible. It's founded on the fact that a second-hand registers sixty seconds. You've lost the sense of wonder. You've translated to [sic] much from abstract to concrete. I can understand entropic logic. I can understand it!

1951M. LesserSense of Wonder in Galaxy Sci. Fiction Sept. 67 (title)

The sense of wonder.

1956D. KnightReading and Writhin' in Future Sci. Fiction May 126/2

Science fiction exists to provide what Moskowitz and others call ‘the sense of wonder’: in more precise terms, some widening of the mind's horizons, in no matter what direction—the landscape of another planet, or a corpuscle's-eye view of an artery, or what it feels like to be in rapport with a cat‥any new sensory experience, impossible to the reader in his own person, is grist for the mill and what the activity of science-fiction writing is all about.

1956R. de SotoRevolving Fan in Amazing Stories Aug. 122

I was struck pleasantly by a wonderful satire on what a certain Moskowitz calls ‘the sense of wonder’—that neurotic, antiquated phrase with which the aforesaid gent has filled sundry columns in fan-and-prozines.

1956D. KnightIn Search of Wonder (1968) 13

Science fiction exists to provide what Moskowitz and others call ‘the sense of wonder’: some widening of the mind's horizons, no matter in what direction—the landscape of another planet, or a corpuscle's-eye view of an artery, or what it feels like to be in rapport with a cat.

1956D. KnightLast Word in Sci. Fiction Stories Mar. 116/2

This story contains the ‘sense of wonder’, the feeling which science fiction exists to create, in such measure that it hits you with an almost physical jolt.

1956‘R. Randall’Guest Editorial in Infinity Sci. Fiction Oct. 86/2

A lot of people have been complaining lately that modern writers don't have the old ‘sense of wonder’, and they blame it on this very business of slanting—among other things. Everybody has their own ‘Golden Age’ that they point to and say: ‘Now, them was the good old days. Gee! I really got a kick outa them stories! Stories are interesting now, but they ain't got that kick any more.’ All right, chums—examine yourselves. When did you feel that ‘sense of wonder?’ Yeah. When you first started reading science fiction! My own Golden Age was during the late thirties and early forties. Mr. Silverberg admits that his was during the middle and late forties. You can see we're both somewhat younger than, say, Sam Moskowitz. Hugo Gernsback, the Grand Old Man of S-F editors, is sure that the best science fiction was written by Jules Verne and H. G. Wells.

1959R. EneyFancyclopedia II 145

Sense of wonder (Moskowitz), that which characterizes stfnists (def. 2) in general; and, the quality in science-fiction that arouses their admiration. Much jeering at SaM's expense has accompanied his proclamations of need for/discovery of this commodity, and many doubt that the phrase really describes anything more definite than the glow of enjoyment.

1963Proceedings: Chicon III 55

SAM MOSKOWITZ: No, I think the conversation has been very good, very lucid, and very entertaining. I have just been sitting back here taking it all in. I was a little surprised to find, through the years, that this term had caught on. I didn't create the term, ‘Sense of Wonder,’ I just used it. And it's been defined by Rollo May in his book, Man's Search For Himself , as a sort of opening attitude, a feeling that there is more to the universe than has been yet observed and that of an awakening attitude. The only thing I can add is that I always felt that modern times science fiction was written for jaded old fans like me.

1971W. F. NolanEdge of Forever 24

[Damon] Knight commented on ‘the deeply moving treatment of cultural impacts,’ and found in Oliver's work, ‘a “sense of wonder”—the feeling which science fiction exists to create—in such measure that it hits you with an almost physical jolt.’

Technological extrapolation, the enthronement of reason, the ‘cosmic viewpoint’, alien contact, and a ‘sense of wonder’ achieved largely through the manipulation of mythic symbolism are all important elements in this visionary novel.

1977B. AshVisual Encycl. Sci. Fiction (1978) 248/2

The general attitude to scientific achievements in the nineteenth century can readily be described as a ‘sense of wonder’, a climate of opinion in which the amazing machines invented by Jules Verne for his Voyages Extraordinaires could be readily accepted by the reader who was already able to see around him the growing benefits of the applied use of science. Wells's early stories, too, made much of this sense of wonder, although the visions they portrayed were often darker than Verne's.

When I was a kid I used to wonder why people in sf stories always wrote with a stylus; I was curious what a stylus was and what made it different from a pencil or a pen. Imagine the damage to my sense of wonder when I realized that a stylus was a pencil or a pen, that all those exotic-sounding cold drinks were martinis or beer, that all those interesting hot drinks were coffee or tea.

1982D. HartwellThe Golden Age of Science Fiction is Twelve in Top of News (1982, issue number unknown) 42

A sense of wonder, awe at the vastness of space and time, is at the root of the excitement of science fiction.

1982R. ArburLeigh Brackett in T. Staicar Feminine Eye (1982) i. 6

‘Sense of wonder’ is science fiction's analogue of mainstream literature's ‘shock of recognition’.

1992Locus Aug. 30/2

Mars offered us good old-fashioned sense-of-wonder sf, with the politics fairly well in the background.

1993Sci. Fiction Age Jan. 6/2

While you're busy lost in the sense of wonder and excitement of it all, the message is being slipped to you between the lines.

1993Sci. Fiction Stud. Nov. 354

Much less postmodern in tone (although still able to generate a certain ‘sense of wonder’) are the necroscopic brain-scans portrayed in much SF cinema and television of the latter 20th century.

1994B. BovaCraft of Writing Sci. Fict. that Sells ii. 8

Science fiction's sense of wonder attracts new writers.

1998L. ShepardMust Have Been Something I Ate in Nebula Awards 32 7

New writers who display the dread symptoms of style, writers like Jonathan Lethem and Paul Witcover, flee the precincts of the genre as fast as their feets can carry them, not caring to endure the combative insults of elf-ridden trilogists, and the field has become glutted with multivolume variations on Lord of the Rings and Sense of Wonder bug-crushers written with all the passionate élan of tax-instruction booklets.

2001Sci. Fiction Chron. July 38/1

The conflict seems an internal one to the genre as well, reappearing year after year in new garb, whether as cries bemoaning the loss of the ‘sense of wonder’ or cries to reanimate Heinlein's serious term ‘speculative fiction’.